Condom Use

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Anchor lead: How do attitudes toward condoms impact on their use among teens? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Sexually active teens don’t just need to prevent pregnancy, they also must avoid a host of increasingly common sexually transmitted infections, and that means using condoms. Yet a CDC study demonstrates that fewer than one in ten do so. Maria Trent, director of adolescent medicine at Johns Hopkins, comments.

Trent: We still have a condom problem. It’s kind of like mask wearing. It’s like a protective barrier. When do you wear it and when do you not? And what we’ve seen is that oftentimes people struggle with doing what is good for them from a public health perspective. We have to continue to encourage adolescents, provide positive messages around condom use, even when people may have long acting contraception, even when people may be on pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV we have to continue to use condoms to prevent the everyday STDs that can truly disrupt their lives.   :31

Trent notes that some sexually transmitted infections are incurable or may have dire health consequences if they go untreated. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.